There's been a few discussions of banner ads before, but I only just noticed one particularly alarming thing while looking at my proxy

The largest cache directory in my proxy is the perlmonks ad server. It's bigger than the one holding my directx 8 download (mainly due to the large cluster size of the hard drive).

For a company with such obviously good programming skills it seems strange that they chose to use a trick like "random number links" to force the picture past my proxy every time.

A reasonable way to server banner ads would be to give the same number to each picture, and a new number if they are ever modified. That way the users always get the new content, but if it has been seen before it comes out of the cache.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

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Re (tilly) 1: Banner ads
by tilly (Archbishop) on Jul 20, 2001 at 01:01 UTC
    Advertisers want a record indicating that the ad was displayed. If you don't force the download, many browsers will not check for whether the ad is stale, and you will have no idea how many didn't see it because they are using junkbuster or friends.

    Of course if everyone just showed up at the Offering Plate then there would be far less need to demonstrate that they really have people seeing the ads...

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      In general you are absolutely correct. There is the interesting discussion that advertisers have actually ruined their market by producing ads that are so annoying that people develop countermeasures. If the ads weren't so damned annoying programs like junkbuster wouldn't be such hot items. I suspect advertisers are spoiled by the captive audiences of TV, radio and billboard.

      <sidenote>In the city where I am, billboards are forbidden, and shops may only advertise on their extrnal walls, or with a reasonable 'shingle'. The only place where anything goes is the industrial district. As a result, every other large city I see reminds me of our industrial district, which is also our red light district.</sidenote>

      All this is slightly beside the point that I had left the ads for the monastery switched on due to the vague thought that since someone at EDC put them there, the ads were doing some good. Until I discovered 24Mb of identical Perlmonks ads sitting in my cache.

      ____________________
      Jeremy
      I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

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        Jeremy, that's exactly what happened to me. I was reading a news article and was fed up by all the ads on the page flashing, bouncing, and whatnot distracting me from what I was trying to read, competing with each other in an arms-race of attention-getting devices.

        That's what motivated me to do something about it.

        If I had the ability in IE to disable GIF animation, that would probably have been the end of it and I wouldn't have looked for other software

        After installing GuideScope, I learned about "web bugs" and how cookies are used to trace your surfing. So distasteful ads aside, I definitly want to filter out "bugs", and I filter cookies except where invited.

        Funny thing... I've never seen a banner ad on PerlMonks. Ads do show up on some sites, such as Space Daily (who takes care to only animate three cycles and then stops). That means PerlMonks must be using one of the "bad" systems.

        The number-changing thing has never fooled it, and I've never noticed it to be an issue. I suppose the ads are coming from a domain that's filtered totally? I don't even see the URL's, so I don't know.

        Forcing the browser to re-download an ad instead of relying on a cached copy is evil. It's a bandwidth hog that should be banned just like huge billboards on an ocean-side freeway. For counting, if the server got the GET, isn't that enough? It answers "no change", but you still were informed! If that's not good enough, you can download a header that contains a redirect. The former is never cached, but the latter is! There are better ways.

        —John

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Re: Banner ads
by agent00013 (Pilgrim) on Jul 21, 2001 at 02:25 UTC
    I'd suggest clearing out your internet cache if it's really really an issue. These guys need to do what they're doing from a business perspective as has already been mentioned in other replies to your post.

    Perl Monks hasn't yet been given large donations from independently wealthy monks. And, so far as I know, none of us have started up an illegally run lottery to fund the site. (see: Priest faces legal hell over temple-run lottery).
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